_The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity._
**Interviewer:** Ambassador Osius, thank you for joining us today. From your time early in your career as a foreign service officer, to ambassador to Vietnam, you consistently interacted with the Vietnamese people, not just engaging elites but hearing the stories of everyday people. Tell us about the importance of this type of diplomatic engagement and what it led to.
**Amb. Osius:** I was known a little bit as the people’s ambassador, or the biking ambassador, when I was there. I really like biking. And in fact, in my first tour to Vietnam, when I was junior mid-level officer, I took a bike ride from north to south, from Hanoi to Saigon. A bunch of us, nine of us from several countries, biked 1200 miles from Hanoi to Saigon. And really, I wanted to learn more about the country, that was the purpose. We got to see how the rice was cultivated, you know, how different it was in the north and the south, we got to meet lots of people. We were like the circus come-to-town a lot of times. They would see somebody who looks like me, who speaks Vietnamese, and they would think that was the funniest thing they could, you know, imagine. Kids would come biking along with us. We loved it, and we learned so much about Vietnam.
So then flash forward 17 years. I’m getting ready to go back to Vietnam. And I have a really good friend, Cathy Stephens. She was my boss when she was principal deputy assistant secretary of the East Asian Pacific Bureau, and she loves to bike too. And, as ambassador to Korea, she had biked twice the length of the Korean peninsula. So, we started talking about this, and I said, “You mean I can still bike? When I’m ambassador, I can still bike? I don’t have to like always be behind tinted windows?” And she said, “No, Ted, not only do you not have to stay behind tinted windows, but if you bike, you’re going to be able to talk to people and it’s going to be very different from the typical image of an ambassador. So yes, Ted, bike.” And I did. And I organized a group and we went from Hanoi to Hui. We ended at the citadel in Hui. And not only did we have fun, but we showed respect to Vietnamese history, Vietnam’s culture. We showed respect to its aspirations because we focused on energy and business development, on the environment, on health, things that mattered to ordinary Vietnamese. We did events at each stop that showed that we were interested in learning as much as we could do about Vietnam. And we called it “Hành trình mới,” which means new journey. And it was all about, you know, we had a logo of a bicyclist, and it was all about like, how do we how do we show the Vietnamese people how much we care? And how interested we are in developing this new relationship, this new journey for our countries, and it was fun. It was cold at times, we got wet, but everybody had a good time.
**Interviewer:** You talked about respect and building connections, respecting the connections with your counterparts there. The relationship between the United States and Vietnam has changed remarkably over the course of your career, and in part from demonstrating that respect and developing these ties. What did it take to go from adversaries between the two countries to security partners in such a relatively short amount of time?
**Amb. Osius:** Well, it took respect. It took us showing respect for Vietnam’s history, priorities, language, and then by showing respect we were able to build relationships and build trust. And I think trust is at the core of diplomacy. And once you’ve built some trust, you can do things together, and then you’ll be able to build more trust, and that leads to partnership.
But let me give you a specific example. When I arrived in Vietnam, I’m American, I came well prepared. You know, I had like a seven-point plan and I had, you know, sub-plans and all these things that I wanted to accomplish in the relationship. And Bill Burns, an icon in the foreign service, he said, you know, “Be ready by the time you hit the ground, be ready to hit the ground running because you’re not going to have that much time.” So, I had my plan and I was all ready. And I arrived, and you know what? The Vietnamese plan wasn’t the same as mine. I started listening to the Vietnamese who said to me again and again, particularly there was a vice foreign minister who was very clear with me, “First, before you do all this other stuff, we need a visit by the general secretary of the Communist Party to the United States.” Now, this is actually more complicated than you’d think, because, for one thing, he’s the head of a party, not a head of state. And usually, people who go and call on the president of the United States are heads of state, not heads of parties. And so, there were all kinds of people in Washington who said, “No way, this is not gonna happen.” Because if he was going to come to the United States, he needed a meeting in the Oval Office. And a lot of people, including the president’s national security advisor and the whole bureaucracy at the State Department, all said, “No, that’s not appropriate.” And I thought about it, and I thought, I could sit and wait for instructions, or I could shape my instructions.
So, I went around the system. I took a risk, and I went to a friend, a very good friend of the Secretary of State, John Kerry’s good friend Tommy Vallely, who was the head of the Vietnam program at Harvard at the time. And I said, “Tommy, we’ve got to get an invitation to the general secretary to come to Washington. He said, “No way, you can’t. That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a hardliner. Why would he want to come, and why would the president want to receive him?” I said, “I’m telling you, the Vietnamese are all telling me this is the key. This will unlock the relationship. This will open up possibilities for us to do lots of things together.” And we were at that point stalled. The security relationship, in particular, was going nowhere. And we were stuck on human rights and we couldn’t get them into TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and there were all kinds of challenges in the relationship. Tommy eventually agreed with me, and he went to John Kerry, and he said, “Mr. Secretary, we got to get an invitation.” And the Secretary said, “I’m going to get beaten up. You know, Susan Rice thinks this is a terrible idea. I’m gonna get so beaten up if I try to do this.” So, he went around her and he went and had lunch with the president and said, “We’ve got to do this, Mr. President. You’ve got to invite the general secretary to come and see you.” And the president said, “Okay, I will do it.”
And he came and the meeting was historic and lasted an hour and a half. It was only supposed to go 45 minutes. As a result, Vietnam joined TPP, we moved the security relationship. All these things were unleashed. We had 21 agreements that were signed and a fantastic visit by the president the following year. None of that would have happened. And to her credit, Susan Rice, at the end of that meeting with the general secretary, she said, “Ted, you were right.” So, I mean, that’s a big person who can say, “I was wrong, you were right. You did the right thing.” And I think the lesson is about respect. I listened to my counterparts. And then I took a risk, and I didn’t wait for instructions or, you know, I as a diplomat, I realized it was my job to advocate for the relationship and to do what I thought was most important for the relationship, and it worked. It altered the relationship for good. It changed the trajectory of our relationship, and it’s continued to this day. And, you know, it led to a double upgrade of the comprehensive partnership, to a comprehensive strategic partnership. It led to security cooperation, cooperation on health, on the environment, peacekeeping. This country that was racked by war is now involved in peacekeeping. You name it. We got the Peace Corps there. So much was made possible because we listened.
**Interviewer:** The relationship between the US and Vietnam fundamentally changed, and changed the U.S. relationship to the region. What would you say to the American people about how this diplomacy and this work advanced their interests?
**Amb. Osius:** There’s some economic benefit. Now Vietnam is our eighth-largest trading partner. It went from, like, bottom of the list over 30 years to become our eighth-largest trading partner. So, there are economic benefits. But I wouldn’t over index on that. It’s not just about, you know, commercial and economic interests. There are huge strategic interests that we have in being partners with a country that has a very long border with China, that has fought the Chinese 22 times in its history, and in its most recent war with China beat them (this was 1979 to 1991), and has stood up to the Chinese in the South China Sea. So, important strategic relationship, but I also wouldn’t over index on that, even though I think it’s very important.
There’s a huge benefit to the people of the United States in the fact that we got past the Vietnam syndrome. We had a tortured history in that country, a terrible, painful war. We lost 58,000 Americans. The Vietnamese lost 3 million of their people. And we have now turned that adversarial relationship into a friendship and a partnership, and it’s good for both nations. It’s good for the people – there are 2.1 or 2.2 million Americans of Vietnamese origin. They can now have a different kind of relationship with the country from which their parents or grandparents came. And I think that was good for America. And it shows we can have, even when they’re not traditional allies, we can have partners. We can have powerful partnerships that help us make a difference in the world – and this is a powerful partnership smack dab in the middle of Asia, the fastest growing part of the planet. Huge opportunities came as a result of listening to Vietnamese, showing respect to them, building trust, and then building partnership.